


Fallen Idyll

by Morbane



Category: Star Stealing Prince
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Brief suicidal ideation, Constructive Criticism Welcome, Demons, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Hypothermia, Survival, Whump, handwavy magic treatment of hypothermia, lost at sea
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-30
Updated: 2019-01-30
Packaged: 2019-10-19 10:22:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17599484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morbane/pseuds/Morbane
Summary: The Sepulcher falls and scatters, and Snowe becomes separated from his friends.





	Fallen Idyll

**Author's Note:**

  * For [NightsMistress](https://archiveofourown.org/users/NightsMistress/gifts), [straightforwardly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/straightforwardly/gifts).



"Stop shaking, Snowe!"

Easy for Erio to say, when the whole floating island was shaking.

He could neither clearly take in, nor entirely avoid, his parents' crumpled bodies. Instead, they flashed in and out of the left corner of his vision like memories from his dreams. He only wished they were nightmares.

"Snowe, concentrate. You're messing it up." He tried to focus on the pattern of circles that Erio was drawing. He let a flame die out just as a tremor threatened, halting a burnt line halfway through the curve Erio was indicating - "Snowe!" - and then it hit. As they all righted themselves, Snowe saw Hiante give him a curious look, but now he really was trying to concentrate. The floating paradise was like a soap bubble about to burst.

Despite his hesitations - or perhaps because of them - they finished the circle. Erio grabbed for Astra. And then - 

He felt another convulsion coming, and braced himself, shifting his weight. It hit, and the piece of floor they were all standing on cracked away from the rest. Snowe, already in motion, leapt without thinking across the crack.

The others reached for each other and fell, the circle lighting up brilliantly underneath them. They were gone.

Then the room shattered apart, and Snowe fell to his knees on the fragmented floor, and fell with it too.

* * *

He'd never imagined a fall could take so long. As Snowe's stomach skipped and his arms flailed, he had time to wonder why he'd been able to feel the Sepulcher shake before the others did - even Hiante with his earth magic, assuming earth magic worked the same way when it was earth balanced on clouds. 

Maybe, now that his parents were dead, some part of control over the paradise had passed to him? An inheritance his parents hadn't wanted to give up to their heir.

Was it strange that when his parent's magic failed - when they had _died_ \- the sky island had fallen? Maybe instead as the magic dissolved, some pieces should have shot sideways or further up into the sky.

But everything was falling now, and also expanding, spreading out through the twilight sky as though it had exploded from within, sunset light catching on pieces of the debris and seeming to catch them aflame. As Snowe thrashed in the air, he felt his feet lose contact with the piece of stone that had been the inlaid floor he stood on. Looking down after it, he realised he could swing his whole body around. And then suddenly he was pointed downwards, and falling faster towards it than it was falling away. 

Would it help, to be perched on top of it as it landed? Would it cushion the impact at all? No, probably not, but he had to try something, and his choices now were stretched as thin as the air.

He caught up to the piece of rubble, hooking his arm around the edge with a determination that he recognised as absurd. 

Maybe, if he had inherited the last vestiges of control over his parents' workings, he could use his will somehow to command this piece to rise. Stupid, perhaps, but again he had to try.

He pulled.

A dark thing was rushing up below him, the floor and the roof of the world rushing together like a great eye closing.

He closed his own eyes.

He felt heavy, squashed, as though something were pressing him into his scrap of stone. His stomach felt as though it were somehow trailing after him, not quite caught up to his descent.

In the middle of the nausea, he flipped. His eyes flew open. But now he was clinging to the marble and he really felt the strain of it - felt as though he was hanging off something that was pulling back against gravity. There was no other falling rubble above him in the sky.

The water smashed across his back.

* * *

The group crashed into a bank of snow.

Hard ground below the snow struck Erio's feet, jarring all the way up his legs. He collapsed unceremoniously forward, only the press of Astra's back preventing him from planting his face in the snow. He lurched backwards, trying to move his weight off her, as she struggled around.

At his elbow, a wide ribbon of ice shone under the cloud-blurred moon, the lines weaving across the top of the snow. That must be the remains of the spell circle, the snow having melted and immediately frozen again.

A little way off, he heard Relenia's muffled cursing, and Hiante's dry cough.

"You did it!" Astra exclaimed, once her face was free of her twisted cloak.

"I did something," Erio muttered, too shaken to feel relieved just yet. "I was aiming for the shrine. I don't think we got there."

He reached out to Hiante, and saw in Hiante's mind that Hiante was just about to lean down and pull first him, then Astra, out of the snowdrift. He raised his arm for Hiante to grab.

Relenia blasted her way out, forcing the snow to obey her. 

Erio gazed around, trying to figure out where they were.

There was something else wrong.

Relenia said, "Where's Snowe?"

* * *

_Not here_ , Erio knew immediately, shaking his head minutely as Hiante looked down at the snowdrift to see if any part was deep enough to have hidden Snowe fully when he fell. _He's_....

Astra turned to him urgently. "Erio! Is he alive? Can you sense where?"

"Yes," Erio said tersely, letting one answer stand for both. 

Part of him immediately wanted to kick himself. He didn't want to give her hope. The impetuous Prince of Sabine was trouble, past and future, backwards and forwards, East and... North. And it was all very well if Snowe wanted to get himself into trouble - as he clearly had, yet again - but Erio hated seeing Astra charge in after him.

Another part of him said, _Good luck telling her no without lying to her. And what she said in the Sepulcher might still be true. Snowe might still be the only key to stopping Sabine from freezing._

Erio resented that second voice.

"Where is he, Erio?" Hiante asked.

Erio raised an arm to point, shaking snow off it. Which gave him his bearings, as he knew inside himself that the direction in which Snowe lay was north by northeast. He didn't have anything else to go on.

"Where are we?" he retorted.

Astra gulped down an ether. "I'll look," she said.

Before Erio could protest - not that it was sure of doing any good - she stepped forward and cast lightning on a solitary tree, tall and leafless, so that it spat and crackled fire, and then turned to flounder through the snow to the other side of the clearing. At the side of another tree, she called on wind magic, and began to rise into the air.

He was at least grateful she'd used the second tree as a guide, keeping it close to hand as she rose. She had a tendency to tilt off course when simply shooting into free air. 

Hiante's mind was still open; Erio got a wave of amused reassurance. Shrugging, and not taking his eyes off Astra, he reached into his pack and fumbled out more ethers and tonics. Astra was hardly the only one whose strength had been near-depleted.

Astra rose above the top of the tree. "Astra!" Erio yelled.

"I can see!" Astra yelled back, and to his relief, began to descend. 

She risked a sideways skid in the air before touching down again, flailed, and managed to land without falling. 

"The Eastern Tower's just through the trees," she called out as she trudged back to them. "That way," - pointing more to the east than Erio had. "We should strike that way." She turned, determined.

This time Erio did keep his mouth shut for a stunned moment, but Hiante looked at him sharply. "Erio, how far off is Snowe? Roughly." 

"Much farther," Erio said, unwillingly acknowledging dread.

"That would mean," Hiante said calmly, "that he is in the sea."

"Looks that way," Erio said. He was sure of it.

Relenia said, "Can the prince even _swim_?"

"Come _on_ ," Astra urged them.

"If he cannot swim, then by now, there would be nothing for Erio to feel," Hiante pointed out grimly. 

Astra looked back at him. "Would you know it, if he - drowned?"

"Yes," Erio said curtly. 

"Then we have to go," Astra said. "We have to get the rowboat and _go_." At least no one was suggesting that he teleport. It simply wasn't possible.

Hiante strode to catch up with her, picked her up, and began to march through the trees. Relenia gave Erio a brief, sympathetic look. "It's all right," Erio told her brusquely. "I won't feel it." If Astra died, he would feel it, exactly as she did. If Snowe died, he would merely feel absence when he reached out. He wasn't sure what he did feel.

* * *

Snowe had never before felt anything like any of this. One agony rose up and was overwhelmed by another. His back felt both as though it had been broken and put back together wrong, and as if it was still breaking, the force that had smashed into it moving through it like the slow explosion that had scattered the Sepulcher. The water - only slowly taking on feel of water, rather than the feel of stone - crushed him with its cold, stunning him and stealing the force from his limbs. On his first involuntary gasp, water had rushed down his throat, gouging his chest. He held back his coughs, trying to expel more water than he took in, expelling bile with it, and as he clamped down his coughing his lungs felt as though something were clamping down on them. 

He struck out with his right arm, or tried to.

 _NO._ Or, he thought it was a NO. It simultaneously sounded - felt - like a shout, and like something he couldn't quite hear. Whatever it was, it was something wrong, and he flinched from it, and then flinched from the pain of his own flinch, rolling helplessly in the water. 

_Up. That way. Foolish little prince, go._ No nearer, and yet clearer, as though, having heard it once, he couldn't unhear it - could never shut it out again. He struck upwards - what the voice told him was upwards - partly to get away. He believed the voice because _up_ fought against him, his cloak tangling his arms, the dark rod from the Sepulcher weighing him down. 

_Unloose your weapons. Let them sink without you._ He could dimly see the sense of that, but still hesitated. _You should listen,_ the voice said. _I want you to live. You're right, that might not last, but I won't save you to let you drown - what would be the fun in that?_ He believed the silky, boastful hatred in the voice, as if he'd believed it before. He fumbled with his belt, twisting to let it slide away and down. Raising his arms to strike upwards again was almost too hard; they were heavier now.

 _SWIM UP, YOU FOOL!_ The voice lashed out. Snowe tried to pull upwards. _Kick your feet. Reach as if on a ladder, one arm after the other, but pull harder. Pull down with curved hands. Idiot, I could swim better than you without having ever had a body!_ It went against all instinct to focus on the voice, but Snowe grimly did. Anything, even the threat of the voice, was better than undiluted pain of not breathing.

His hand broke the surface and he clawed at the air, as though he could swirl the whole world into a more favourable mix of water and air, bringing a pocket of air directly to his mouth. He pulled suddenly harder, involuntarily trying to get away again - the voice was laughing. 

He broke the surface and gasped and coughed and spat, and breathed again, and in his struggle, breathed when his mouth had sunk beneath the surface of the water again, and struggled up to cough and heave and gasp all over again.

 _Tsk, little prince. You're undoing all my good work._ But the voice sounded more relaxed now, simply cruelly amused, and Snowe supposed that that meant he was not as close to dying as he had been.

It wasn't, of course, as simple as getting to the surface. Snowe wasn't sure if something in his back was broken or not - he had been able to move his arms and legs and neck, however much pain it had caused him - but it was not easy to keep his head up. His arms felt as though, left alone, their weight would have dragged him down as surely as his abandoned gear could have. His cloak pulled insistently on his neck, making it harder to breathe when he did rise, and the bottom of it tangled around his legs, making it harder to kick.

_You should let that go too. But I understand why you won't. It's such a fine colour on you. You were wearing a cloak like that when they brought me to you. Finally, you remember._

He didn't speak, but he knew it was true, and perhaps the voice - the demon inside him - felt him acknowledge that.

 _Yes. I've been here since then. I remember the things you don't. I remember more of your life than you do. Isn't that a paradox? It's your life, and you don't remember it. Which is real, the life you lived or the life you remember living? Or are you only real with_ my _witnessing? You don't want me, but I don't want my witness, either. I suppose I've watched over you. In spite of them._

Them. His parents.

_I know you remember what they did. I'm so glad they finally died for it. It felt good, didn't it, Snowe?_

He was goaded into speaking. "No," he spat. 

_Have you_ forgotten _already? You confronted them with their betrayal. You accused them of leaving you and your little kingdom to die. And then you and your friends killed them. Do you think now that they didn't deserve that?_

"No," Snowe said, knowing neither no nor yes were exactly right, and it cost him to say it, to use up air on replying to the taunts, but he didn't care. He didn't want to think about what he'd thought.

The voice sounded almost sympathetic, then. _I understand it's hard for humans, sometimes, the first time you kill someone. It'll be easier next time. You needed practice, before you could kill Astra._

* * *

They argued about it in bursts as they hurried through the trees to the Eastern Tower. 

"You, me, and Erio," Astra said. "Erio has to come if we're to find Snowe. Hiante can row the best. I can help with rowing, and I can heal."

No one answered her at first. It was almost fully night, and the woods were slow going, even for Hiante's strength, and to Erio's vision.

"Thank you, Princess Astra, but I won't need someone to take turns with the rowing," Hiante said. In his head, Erio could see Hiante's concern that they would not arrive in time, and pull Snowe from the waves only so Astra could watch him die. 

"When we find Snowe, Erio can teleport back to make the load lighter," Astra argued. "But you'll need me there to help warm Snowe up." 

"If he can teleport by then. If he can't, it's three at most if you don't come."

"And I can heal," Erio pointed out. That had its own dangers, but in the circumstances, that didn't seem to matter.

"How much healing can you do if you can't even teleport?" Astra challenged.

"Enough," Erio growled back.

"I can heal," Relenia broke in. "And I can use my magic to speed us on the way. Astra, you should stay."

After a pause, Astra said, "Fine. You're right. I should stay. But that means Hiante should put me down, and carry you instead, Relenia, to make better time. I can find the tower on my own."

Both Hiante and Erio exclaimed at that. 

"It's not like you won't know if I get into trouble, Erio!" Astra exclaimed in reply.

"I won't be able to get to you even if I do know," he retorted.

They reached a top of a ridge. The Eastern Tower's window lights shone ahead of them, through the trees and away across the snow.

"There," Astra said. "If you want me to stay behind, let me stay. You're right, I should stay back. But you can't insist on seeing me to the tower while Snowe's out in the sea!" She pushed against Hiante's chest, and reluctantly, he set her down on her feet.

Relenia stepped up to Hiante. "Let's go," she said laconically, "the sooner to be back."

Erio hated it. He hated the King and Queen, and he hated Snowe, and he hated the way that even Astra's bright hair, and brighter, anxious smile, faded into the darkness behind them.

* * *

He was going under again. Not under the water this time, but under memory. Perhaps he half-fainted, because for a moment he was not in the ocean, but in the place the demon took him in his dreams, and he knew that he had been there before, and that he was there because of the demon. There was the paradoxical palace, and the dark sky, lit by fire even before the fire bloomed. There was the stake, and Astra.

It wasn't Astra as she usually was in the dreams. This Astra was shimmering and blurry, and he kept thinking he saw the stake through her; as if because he knew he was still in the real world the real Astra overrode this Astra, and he couldn't quite believe in the Astra of the dream. But that made the image of the stake worse, not better, because somewhere out there - surely Erio had saved her as they fell - the real Astra lived and could be burned. 

The edges of the Astra at the stake began to fill in, because Snowe was fading. Reality imposed itself, with Snowe's stabbing aches and the cold sea.

It had been warmer in the castle of the demon's dreams.

"I w-won't kill Astra," Snowe said angrily.

_So stubborn. I can wait a little longer. But I won't wait forever._

"Why is _th-that_ wh-what you want?"

_She is the witness. Until she dies, I cannot be free of you. Nor can you be free of me. Do you think I'm cruel, to show you dreams of horror? You are lying to yourself if you do not realise that your life will come to that horror in the end. Drive us both mad and draw it out, or end it with a clean, quick death and a chance to start again._

"Not h-hers. It sh-shouldn't have to be h-hers."

_She helped you kill your parents. She helped you kill the queen, who acted as her mother. There is already blood on her hands, just as there is on yours. Kill her to conclude the tragedy, and then you can start a new story._

"It's not that simple."

 _Isn't it? You thought you could rescue a princess from a tower, and that would right all your parents' wrongs. And now that you know what your parents_ really _did, you won't fix it. Yes, it's ugly, but sometimes what must be done is ugly, my dear prince. I'd shield you from it if I could, but you won't let me. No, you say, no, no, no to everything._

"I _am_ stubborn," Snowe said firmly, letting anger warm him. "I'm _never_ g-going to agree to this."

There was another pause, and then the demon laughed again, slow and curling, as awful as it had been the first time when Snowe had pushed through pain to swim, not to save himself, but to get away.

 _Perhaps. Are you stubborn enough to save yourself, little prince? I've done what you'll let me, but I can feel you getting weaker._ The demon sounded almost sad. _And so the prince died, in the ruins of his parents' paradise, far from his people, who would soon know that he had abandoned them to die. Even I don't like the sound of that tragedy. But I can swim, and I have power you don't. If you let me, I could swim you to safety._

"Shut up." Anger wasn't much warmth, after all. Snowe clenched his jaw, but it was mostly from the cold.

He couldn't feel his fingers, though they glimmered faintly in the water in front of him in the light of the fixed stars. His hands felt like clubs, or stubs, when he pulled them through the water to try to keep himself up. All of his skin, everywhere, felt as though it had turned to inanimate, nerveless cloth, a fake layer between him and his real body, which had somehow shrunk down, like ice in water itself. He didn't feel real around his edges. It dulled some of the pain. The cold still squeezed him, but slower, a great press that would eventually flatten him out.

It did seem like a stupid ending. But he wasn't willing to believe the demon, that this was the end for the whole kingdom too. Maybe Richard and Vera would find a new spell - maybe they would be freer to act, now that the spells his parents had laid on them were broken. Maybe Astra, the Star Princess, would figure out a new way to use the stars. Maybe Erio...

...Erio. _Erio._ Erio had touched his blood. Erio knew where he was. Erio didn't like Snowe, and right now, Snowe couldn't exactly blame him. But Astra knew that Erio would know where he was. Astra had chosen to go with him to activate the obelisks, to save Sabine. Astra would come after him. They would come after him because he might still be the key to saving Sabine. Maybe he wasn't - they all had reason to doubt what Richard had told them - but they couldn't risk the danger that it _was_ true. So - if Erio had saved them all, and he'd seen the circle light up in activation - they were coming for him.

He just had to wait.

* * *

In the tower, Astra guessed at sizes and folded a second pile of clean dry clothes, with a blanket on top, just in case Erio _could_ teleport back and forth and _could_ retrieve them once the group had retrieved Snowe.

In the rowboat, Relenia sat at the stern, her palms up, pushing the water away behind them, and Erio sat at the prow, frowning ahead into the darkness, and Hiante sat in the middle, rowing in a perfect, even rhythm.

* * *

"Wh-which w-way is the sh-shore, anyway?" Snowe said, with a too-obvious attempt at nonchalance, not trying to smooth over his stutter. 

_A brave and noble prince. This should be amusing. Turn yourself left. A little more. There._

The demon sounded smug, as well it might. Its generosity did not extend to further swimming instructions. Snowe attempted to manoeuvre through the water with his head still up, his arms scooping water loosely towards him, his legs twitching parodies of kicks to keep him upright. He wasn't sure he was making any progress at all - he might merely have discovered a more elaborate method to keep himself in place. The demon was silent for the first few minutes, but then began a stream of taunts, alternately dripping sympathy and offering elaborate praises for Snowe's efforts. Snowe kept it up perhaps longer than he should have, stung after all.

He only had to buy time. He only had to make the demon think he was wearing himself down, so the demon wouldn't try to do it for him, or raise the stakes.

He stopped when he knew he was getting so tired that if he stopped, he might not even have the energy to keep his head above the water.

_There there, my prince. Rest a while. Rest forever - if you must. I still think it's a pity._

He let the silence go on, pointedly, until he sputtered a mouthful of water and realised he was almost dozing where he paddled again. Sleep was far too dangerous: drowning and dreaming presenting equal threats. 

"If - if you remember what I don't," he said jerkily, "show me a memory. Something happy, unless torturing Astra is all you're good for."

_Rude, and childish. You were better, once, as a child. You were even fun sometimes, when you were still a novelty. But I think you grew tired of me first. Is it so unfair that I've grown tired of you?"_

Snowe couldn't think of an answer.

_I'm not so cruel I won't grant you a last wish._

He was still on the threshold of dreams, and the demon passed the memory to him in between the cracks in his thoughts. He was standing under trees with a shadowy man, and the shadowy man was half again as tall as he was, because he was quite small, almost as small as he had been in the obelisk memory.

"Throw it up, little prince." Snowe was holding a piece of cloth - a tea-towel? A square scrap? - and at the shadowy man's instruction, he flung it into the air. The shadowy man tossed a fireball after it. Instead of lighting the cloth on fire, it it soared under it, and the cloth shot upwards as the fire dissipated.

"Your turn," the shadowy man said, and threw a cloth of his own.

Snowe's fireball did set the cloth to smouldering, but it shot upwards and both of them laughed.

Snowe spat out another mouthful of water, and shook himself out of the memory-dream.

 _I used to teach you what I knew,_ the demon said. _Don't be alarmed... they were only things a child should know. Your mother didn't like it, but she wouldn't teach you, so she shouldn't have complained. But there were a lot of things the dear Queen shouldn't have done, as well as things she should have, don't you think?_

Snowe scowled, and refused to agree. Memory unlocked memory: now he remembered Vera finding him practising, alone, and then taking him to sew light, gauzy spheres of cloth, and helping him learn to send them soaring with heated air as if they were great fabric bubbles. 

The cloak was still pulling at his neck, the clasp settled into a groove that would surely show up as blue and red marks for a week - if he lived a week, if Sabine lived a week. In his current exhaustion, the cloak was too heavy for him to keep. Unless... He concentrated on the gap of air under the cloak where he was trying to keep his shoulder blades above the water, and brought a seed of a flame to bear. It felt nice, almost like the healing - and the closest thing he would get to it. He concentrated further, twisting and writhing to try to trap more bubbles of air under the top of the cloak, and bring more of it up to the surface. Maybe he could dry the whole cloak out, and let it float on the surface of the water... But while that was still a vague fantasy, he lost control of the fire, and it went out, and the cloak rippled silently down again, nothing but weight. Well, he'd borne it so far. When he couldn't, he would let it go.

The demon was tactful. _You've been practising. Very studious._

"Vera taught me," Snowe said.

 _I taught you first._ It sounded jealous. _You're mine, my prison, Snowe, and I'm yours. I don't like being imprisoned, but I don't hate you. Not like I hated your father and mother._

"Not like you hate Astra," he retorted.

 _We will have to disagree on Astra. I can save you, Snowe. I don't want you to have to be tired any more..._ \- ugh, that shouldn't be tempting. _You can choose to drown, and everyone you know will die as Sabine freezes, including your Star Princess. Or you can let me kill her, and save everyone else. Forget her. She's already as good as dead. Think of yourself._

Snowe thought, I'd rather hope that she can save herself.

He'd also hoped he could hold out longer, but he was fading. He kindled a flame again - using the space in front of his nose as a reference, since he could hardly keep his arms up, much less hold a palm above the water - and used it to shoot a fireball straight up, into the dark sky.

If they were coming, they'd find him.

He winced in dismay as for a third time, the demon began to laugh.

* * *

_Oh, Snowe,_ the demon said. _Oh, I am so glad you do want to live after all. I was beginning to worry! But I know you so well. I warned you, I told you I knew you better than you knew yourself. But I've had such a hard time making you listen, lately._

"I'm not g-going to let _you_ take over my b-body so that I can live," Snowe retorted. "So you don't have any say at all."

_Noble prince, arrogant prince, reckless prince. I don't need your permission. Eventually, you won't be able to stop me. I only have to wait._

The demon sounded so utterly confident that Snowe couldn't sneer at it, even deep within his heart. How long had he been dreaming about killing Astra? What was it doing to him, returning to that dream over and over again?

He'd gone to save Astra from the Eastern Tower because of a dream.

Had the dream inspired him to save her - or merely to seek her out?

"Maybe I won't w-wait, then," he said in a rush. "Maybe it's better if I drown."

He tried to dive. There was no power to it, only an abortive, splashy sinking. Maybe if he bundled the cloak around his head, and tied it somehow - knots seemed like an impossible effort - maybe he wouldn't be able to untie it in time... Maybe Erio would turn back. 

_You don't have much time. I think your friends are coming._ Snowe wondered how he knew. Maybe the demon could hear oars that Snowe had been too distracted to hear.

No. No. He wouldn't believe this. The demon had every reason to lie to him. Snowe had no reason to believe the idea that sooner or later, he would do what the demon wanted and not what Snowe himself desired. He had lived with the demon inside him for ten years. He would live that way for as many more years as possible - or find a way to free himself and Astra without killing anyone. Magic, and no bloodshed, had sealed the demon inside Snowe. Magic, and no bloodshed, must provide a way to get it out.

He could hear the oars now too. He wet his lips and croaked a call out to his friends.

_It's your choice, Snowe, even if it's not what you want. Maybe, when the time comes, for your sake, I'll be a little sorry._

* * *

When Relenia's wave tossed Snowe into the boat, all they could get out of him was, "Astra. Don't let Astra."

"She's all right, Snowe. She's back at the Eastern Tower."

Only when this seemed to get through to him did he stop twitching away from their efforts to strip his clothing and replace it with dry things. Only when he was convinced that Astra was not with him did he allow Erio to curl up with him under a rough blanket at the bottom of the boat.

"Warm," he muttered.

"That's a good sign," Relenia observed, ignoring Erio's embarrassed flush. "You're really helping him."

"Keep her safe," Snowe muttered into Erio's shoulder.

It was entirely typical of Snowe, incoherent at the end of a rescue, to tell Erio how to carry out Erio's primary mission. Perhaps he _would_ be all right.

* * *

Snowe slept.

When he woke, everything hurt, and he was warm.

There was another body curled around him, much warmer than his, gloriously warm. " _Don't_ move," a sharp voice near his ear commanded. "Astra and Relenia did their best, but you were a new education in human injuries and I wouldn't be surprised if you broke or sprained something new by breathing wrong."

"Am I allowed to t-talk?" Snowe wanted to know, irritated.

The voice let a pause linger just long enough for Snowe to realise Erio was needling him back. "If you like. I can't imagine you gained important information for the preservation of Sabine during falling, paddling, and sleeping."

Snowe's head jerked up at that - he couldn't help it. Something was wrong there, even though he wasn't sure what. He had a feeling he should remember something, something important, and he didn't.

"Hm," Erio said softly behind him. "Well, maybe it'll come back to you."

"Ow," Snowe muttered, involuntarily and distantly. As alertness returned, he could feel his skin as a patchwork of dullness and dull needle-pricks. 

Relenia's voice came from above. "You're lucky, Snowe, I'm going to guess you can feel your fingers and toes."

"Yep," Snowe said, not entirely happy about the sensations. Relenia laughed. "Pull back a bit, Erio." He did, to Snowe's disappointment, and then healing washed over Snowe. This time, the tingling in his extremities was odd, but refreshing. Not at all painful.

As the healing ebbed, the itchy prickling crept back in, but it wasn't as bad. Snowe resigned himself to it.

Erio moved back towards Snowe, his warmth radiating through Snowe's borrowed pyjamas.

"Are you, um, staying?" Snowe said. It felt really nice, being hugged. Surely he didn't need it though, now. And surely Erio didn't actually want to.

"We're not going to pull you out of hours in the freezing ocean only to dust you off and march you back to Sabine Castle, Snowe," Erio pointed out. "While you were unconscious, you responded best to me. So you get me."

"Okay." Snowe said. That made sense to him. And Erio didn't seem mad about it. He tried a little laugh. "I'd do the same for you."

Erio didn't say anything for a moment, then, pointedly as a substitution for whatever else he was thinking, he said, "Thanks, Snowe."

"I've been asleep for a while, I guess," Snowe said. "Could you help me sit up? I don't think I want to sleep any more just now." He was very, very sure of it, and puzzled by his own certainty.

"Okay," Relenia said from across the room. "We need to get you to drink more, anyway."

"Water?"

"Water. Then tonics. Then water."

* * *

They helped him sit up, and Astra came in and hugged him, very gently, and when he winced - more, Erio noted, than he'd winced at Hiante, even though Hiante gave firm, fleshless hugs, and sometimes accidentally pinched - she backed off and attempted to make up for it by tousling his hair instead.

Erio arranged himself with his shoulder pressed against Snowe's, both of them bundled under a blanket as well as clothes, and Hiante read to them from an adventure book. It was a good adventure, but Hiante's voice was also soothing. Snowe's eyes kept drifting closed. Every time he nodded forward, Erio shifted, jolting him a little. 

Hiante went to put away the book. "Well," Snowe said, eyes half closed again, "I think I remember parts of the s-story's middle. And its ending. Erio?"

"Yeah?"

"Y-you don't like me much. You said you'd end me if I let anything to Astra."

"Still applies."

"Somehow that d-doesn't bother me as much as it did before."

Well, that was cryptic. "We'll talk about it after you've slept again," he told Snowe, filing the thought away for later.

"Thanks, Erio," Snowe said, and snuggled down in the blankets, making soft unhappy noises as he jolted various injuries. He seemed to have forgotten his earlier insistence of staying awake. Erio rolled his eyes.

"Don't mention it," he murmured, and lay down next to Snowe, very carefully. Snowe promptly ruined the effort by wriggling closer to him. "Snowe, stay still. It's for your own good."

"Y-you got me to stop shaking," Snowe muttered, clearly half asleep, though awake enough to smile at his own joke. "That'll have to do for now."

Erio sighed, and threw an arm over Snowe, and closed his eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> Hello - so this was meant to be a Yuletide Madness treat for both of you. Whoops? Thanks for your falling-from-Sepulcher prompts, straightforwardly, and I hope this ticks some of your hurt/comfort likes, NightsMistress!
> 
> Thanks to egelantier and thedevilchicken for cheerleading!!


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